Visual metaphors to model metacognitive strategies that support memory during the process of refinding information

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that models the metacognitive thinking of users in relation to memory and refinding information. Twenty-seven participants, in five separate groups ranging in age from 13 to early 30's, sketched visual metaphors representing strategies and interventions that the participants thought would remind them to remember before information was lost, in order to better relocate information. Nine themes emerged: embeddedness, fear and anxiety, interruptions, messiness and discomfort, locked doors and barriers, proximity and adjacency, signs and tattoos, scripts, and finally, the voice. This study started from the premise that design should begin with the user's metaphor as a way to describe the user's mind and ways of thinking and end with the designer mapping the metaphor to the artifact. The long term goal of this work is to move from ideation to implementation, using the users' metaphors of the mind as a basis for the design of information environments that scaffold metacognition during the search process.